"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Minima Moralia: Toward the End
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December 3, 2008
Adorno's Minima Moralia ends thus:
Toward the End.—The only kind of philosophy for which, in the face of despair, responsibility could be assumed, would be the attempt to contemplate all things the way that they would present themselves from the stand point of redemption. Cognition has no light other than the one that shines onto the world from redemption: everything else exhausts itself in reconstruction and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives would have to be manufactured in which the world similarly displaces and estranges itself, revealing its tears and cracks, as it at some point will lie there, needy and disfigured, in the Messianic light. To gain such perspectives without arbitrariness and violence, wholly from one’s contact with the objects—this alone is what matters to thinking. This is the easiest of all because the condition irrefutably calls for such cognition, indeed, because completed negativity, once fully captured by the eye, shoots together to form the mirror writing of its opposite. But it also is the entirely impossible, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even if only by the most minuscule degree, from the sphere of the spell of being, whereas every possible cognition, in order to become binding, not only must first be wrested from what is, but, for this very reason, is itself struck with the same disfiguration and neediness from which it intends to escape. The more passionately thought seals itself off from its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously and, therefore, the more disastrously, it falls toward the world. It must grasp even its own impossibility for the sake of the possible. But, faced with the demand that thereby is issued to it, the question concerning the reality or unreality of redemption is itself almost irrelevant.
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Gary, A friend of mine pointed me to this reference pointing out that the author has really done his homework.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-1-three-beliefs